Prabowo warns of protests, but real test for Jokowi is his promises

Jakarta: About a month ago, in the cut and thrust of the Indonesian presidential debate, Prabowo Subianto quoted the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

The former military strongman, who has a fondness for quoting world-historical figures and who on Wednesday lost the 2019 presidential election to Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, would do well to recall the observation of another world-historical figure, Karl Marx, who once wrote that all great world events happen twice, first as tragedy and then as farce.

If the events of the last two days are any guide, Indonesia is about to endure a farcical rerun of the days following the 2014 presidential election campaign, when Prabowo lost to Jokowi by about six percentage points, promptly ignored the result, claimed victory and challenged the legitimacy of the election.

Buttons featuring Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga "Sandi" Uno at a campaign rally in Karawang, West Java.Credit:Bloomberg

He is at it again in 2019, despite quick count poll results from reputable pollsters including Litbang Kompas, Indobarometer, CSIS, SMRC, Indikator, Chartapolitika and Poll Tracking Indonesia all pointing to a Jokowi victory.

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The president increased his margin of victory to between eight and 10 percentage points, and while the official count will not conclude until May 22, he is all but certain to be returned for a second and final five-year term.

Not that that mattered to the defeated candidate at a press conference on Thursday night in Jakarta.

"I, Prabowo Subianto, state that I and Sandiaga Salahuddin Uno declare victory [and that we will be] President and Vice-President of the Republic of Indonesia for 2019-2024 based on the counting of more than 62 per cent of the real count," he said.

"We declare victory in advance because we have proof there are attempts of various frauds taking place in various villages, districts and cities all over Indonesia."

Prabowo made the declaration with a glum-looking Sandiaga by his side (pictured right, below, in the blue shirt). The vice-presidential candidate had not been seen for nearly 24 hours - an aide blamed a bad case of hiccups - but Sandiaga's face told the true story.

Australian National University Indonesia expert Marcus Mietzner predicts that "both a court challenge and street protests are certain. But they won't change the outcome. The margin of victory is about 15 million votes [190 million Indonesians were eligible to vote]. The court won't overturn that."

A gathering of Prabowo supporters was expected after Friday prayers. Already, the coordinating minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs, Wiranto, has issued a stern warning of "firm action against any movement that can disturb security".

The ever-cautious Jokowi on Thursday said that "even though based on past experience quick count results were 99.9 per cent accurate, we have to be patient and wait for KPU [the national election commission] official counts".

Less subtly, the president also tweeted a picture of himself receiving congratulatory phone calls from world leaders including Singapore's Lee Hsien Loong, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohammad and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

So while the farce of Prabowo's protests plays out, the more interesting questions to examine are how did Jokowi secure his victory, and what will he do as president over the next five years?

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Jokowi leads a country that is not so much at a crossroads but which at times struggles to make the right choices that will lead it down the road that offers greater equality, economic development and openness, underpinned by improvements to education and health care.

In the president's first term, investment in infrastructure was the signature achievement, with thousands of new kilometres of roads and rail, new air and sea ports, and billions of dollars handed directly to thousands of village chiefs across the archipelago for small-scale projects.

But the election results bear out the truism that Indonesia is a country increasingly divided along religious, ethnic and geographic lines.

The more conservative, Islamic parts of the country such as the provinces of Banten and West Java, and parts of Sulawesi and Sumatra strongly backed Prabowo, while eastern and central Java swung to the incumbent, as did predominantly Christian and Hindu provinces.

Mietzner explains the results like this: "Jokowi's vote share in both Central and East Java increased by around 12 to 13 per cent, or about 6 million votes. In West Java, there seems to have been no change from 2014.

Indonesian President Jokowi runs to the stage at his final election rally in Jakarta on Saturday.Credit:Amilia Rosa

"The addition of Ma'ruf Amin [an ageing and influential cleric who once led Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest Islamic civil organisation in the world] had an indirect but important effect. He did not move votes in Banten and West Java - which is what he had been expected to do - but because NU had made his nomination the key condition for supporting Jokowi, NU's mobilisation in its strongholds of Central and East Java eventually made the difference."

Jokowi will be president of a country that, according to the IMF's latest half-yearly forecasts, will by 2024 be the fifth-largest economy in the world measured in real output or purchasing power parity.

His party, the PDI-P, looks set to be the biggest in the national legislature (though it will hold only about 20 per cent of the seats) and - with the help of allied parties and deal-making - the president should be able to work with the parliament.

Neither candidate released much in the way of detailed policy proposals, but Jokowi has promised to invest more in human capital in his second term while continuing the work on infrastructure, and touts three new smart cards: one for financial relief to students, a pre-work card that offers training, and a card designed to reduce the cost of basic staples for poorer families.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a politics professor at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, says the election result is a qualified approval of Jokowi and his political agenda.

She says the result indicates that many of the president's supporters have been disappointed with his unwillingness to stand up for the rights of minority groups during his first term, and his lack of commitment to democratic consolidation 21 years after the fall of the dictator Suharto - and she hopes that will change in his second term.

"Despite his [Jokowi's] stress on not being Java-centric, Prabowo made inroads into a lot of provinces [outside the main island of Java]," she says.

"He will continue with infrastructure development, there were a lot of promises from five years ago that aren’t finished, such as the construction of new power plants. He needs to be more mindful, if Indonesia invites more Chinese investment, that the model is refined so it creates less social backlash [about Chinese workers taking Indonesians' jobs, a theme of Prabowo's during the campaign]."

Tom Lembong, the chairman of the Indonesian government's Investment Coordinating Board, told Bloomberg TV that Jokowi will "resume or even accelerate economic policy reforms" in his second term and that the president has a "very strong mandate" to overcome resistance to reforms that have left Indonesia's economy relatively closed, protected and not always welcoming towards foreign investment.

"A greater opening-up of the economy to integration with our neighbours, the region, the world economy, more investment, better training, a more investment-friendly tax regime, that's all on the table now," Lembong said.

But Mietzner is less optimistic: "The election result will do nothing to reduce Jokowi's apparent fear that any radical reform measure could alienate important conservative constituencies and thus create instability.

"Moreover, the fact that NU won this election for him in Central and East Java will turn NU into an intra-governmental veto power, further slowing down potential reform initiatives," he says.

While Prabowo tilts at electoral windmills, Jokowi faces a tougher test: taking his enlarged mandate and turning it into an effective second term that delivers on his promises.

James Massola is south-east Asia correspondent based in Jakarta. He was previously chief political correspondent, based in Canberra. He has been a Walkley and Quills finalist on three occasions, won a Kennedy Award for outstanding foreign correspondent and is the author of The Great Cave Rescue.